Generally, a memory leak relates to the gradual loss of available memory when an application (or part of an operating system) repeatedly fails to return memory that it has obtained for temporary use. For example, a memory leak may result when a block of dynamic memory cannot be released by a running application because the reference pointers to the memory block are absent. As a result, repeated generations of leaked memory can cause an application to run out of memory or cease functioning altogether. Although developers are cognizant of memory management when developing applications, the increased performance capabilities of modern devices often mask the effects of inefficient memory usage. However, for an application that is open frequently or runs continuously, even a slight memory leak may diminish the performance of a device by reducing the available amount of memory. For example, these slight memory leaks when aggregated may affect performance in environments where multiple applications from third-party applications are running on the device as a background process.
Although the deleterious effects of memory leaks are well known, memory leaks are not that uncommon, especially in environments that use programming languages without built in automatic garbage collection. Accordingly, a number of memory debugging or memory profiling tools have been developed to aid with the process of analyzing memory usage. These tools, however, are often tedious to use, and accordingly, not always developer friendly. For example, these tools often require a developer to analyze countless lines of text or manage complicated relationship representations. Moreover, such tools are not easily scalable in production environments where memory sizes may be in the order of gigabytes. Thus, it is often the case that current memory debugging tools are not always utilized by developers, and accordingly, developed applications may suffer from memory management inefficiencies that may otherwise be preventable.